Dara here with your weekly news update!
5. What UX Isn't (Medium.Com)
4. Understanding the Four Layers of Javascript OOP (②ality – JavaScript and more)
3. Xamarin and REST APIs (DZone)
2. Microsoft is Technology's Comeback Kid (TechCrunch)
1. 25 Spectacular UI Designs for Inspiration (Design Instruct)
I'll never forget TechEd 2006 when Microsoft introduced the Office Ribbon with the Office Fluent User Interface in Office 2007 to developers. During TechEd, The Infragistics booth was buzzing with customers asking “when will Infragistics ship a Ribbon control”. The Ribbon UI was literally rolled out 24 hours earlier, yet the developer market already knew that this new Office Ribbon was going to be baked into their apps sooner or later. Fast forward to 2014, and pretty much every internal & external corporate line of business application includes an Office style Ribbon. In fact, most apps that you see on the market today resemble an Outlook-style UI, or a Word-style UI. So why is this? Why do customers and business ask their developer teams to deliver this Office Inspired experience? The answer is easy – ease of use & familiarity for their users. The Office suite is the most widely used business tool on the market, so if your apps can mimic that experience, the cost of training and understanding of the user base goes away. Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars (or maybe even more) convincing the market to use Office, to use the Ribbon, so you might as well take advantage of that education. Make your users happy – build them Office Inspired Apps.
And that really sums up one of the huge benefits that Infragistics Ultimate brings to the market – we enable developers to deliver pixel-perfect Office Inspired experiences to your customers.
![WPF-Themed-1[1]](http://www.infragistics.com/media/41565/WPF-Themed-1.png "WPF-Themed-1[1]")
So let's take a look at what Infragistics Ultimate offers in terms of helping you deliver these pixel-perfect Office Inspired apps to your customers. Across all of our products we have literally hundreds of UI components that help deliver Office experience, like text editors, status bars, Word and Excel libraries to name a few, but for this blog, we will focus on the key UI elements that give your customers the true Office App feeling.
In Infragistics Windows Forms, we have pretty much every control you can imagine to build a rich, modern, touch-enabled experience for your users. To build an Office Inspired UI, it takes only minutes, are you can see in this how-to video.
[youtube] width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dCTmWjN3WkA" [/youtube]
We bring the key controls, like the Office Ribbon, Outlook Bar, Grid& DockManager to help you build a great experience. And the Grid is not just any grid, it includes all of the interactivity your users expect, like sorting, grouping, filtering, editing and more.
And even cooler UI control added in 2014 to the Infragistics Windows Forms product is the Pivot Grid, which allows you to build Excel-like interactive pivot tables on the fly in your apps.
If you are looking for a more modern, Windows 8.1 style experience, we also include the Radial Menu control, which is a touch-friendly UI for modern apps. This control is available in Windows Forms, WPF & jQuery in Infragistics Ultimate.
To learn more about building Office Inspired Windows Forms apps, check out these resources:
How to Create a Pivot Grid in Windows Forms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0gl8dQy_EM
Building an Office Style UI in Minutes with Windows Forms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCTmWjN3WkA
Windows Forms – Deep Dive into the Data Grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WWddNMuMoU&list=PL0E38885A100B2C8A
And the easiest way to get started building Windows Forms Office Inspired apps is to fire up Visual Studio - you can now find a new set of Infragistics templates in the File - New Project dialog. These templates are designed to help you get started with a functional, well-designed, and fully-styled application.
Each Starter Kit includes real data so you don’t have to dig around to figure out how to do the basics to get up and running in delivering stunning apps to your customers!
The story is similar in WPF, we include all of the key UI elements that would make up a stunning Office UI, including the Office 13 Backstage experience.
But we’ve gone even further in the last 12 months with some really cool Office Inspired controls. We now ship a Word-like Rich Text Editor which literally mimics the experience you get in Microsoft Word, with all of the formatting capabilities and features, even reading & writing HTML, RTF & Word.
We’ve also shipped previews of our Visio-inspired Diagramming control, and our Excel-inspired Spreadsheet control.
The nice thing about the Excel Spreadsheet control that's built on top of our Excel library, which we've been building over the last 10 years to pretty much include every feature you can imagine that Excel delivers. So while technically challenging, it wasn't that far of a leap to build a great Office UI on top of the Excel library.
To really show you how to build an Office Inspired experiences in WPF, we've shipped a pixel-perfect Outlook app built using Infragistics WPF controls. Get it from the WPF product page, just scroll down to the Application Samples.
To get started with building an Office Inspired Outlook UI in WPF, check out this video and more tutorials on YouTube:
[youtube] width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lmk4cDsXrOk" [/youtube]
Explore the WPF Diagram Control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp4Q3Lz1shQ
Getting Started with WPF Ribbon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHpQJcPVaX0&list=PL70D9EF2166B6B667
Read Brian’s blog on the latest Office capabilities in the XAML products.
As you can see, you are not that far from starting to deliver beautiful Office Inspired applications. We covered the key UI controls in Windows Forms & WPF in this blog, but it does not stop there. Our ASP.NET & jQuery / HTML5 products both have key UI controls that can help you deliver Office Inspired to the web. And don’t forget about custom styling … we ship modern Office & Windows themes in every platform, so making your next app a Pixel-Perfect Office Inspiration is right around the corner!
Get started today and download Infragistics Ultimate!
If you can't seem to find the Office UI you are looking for, shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com and let me know what's on your mind!
Why do many custom-built apps fail? Because they aren't familiar to their users. Check out the infographic below for more information on why you should build Office-inspired apps, and how Infragistics can help you!
You can also view the full-size infographic HERE.
Sources: Microsoft by the Numbers; 2012 Infragistics Survey
CEE MVP Open Days 2014 was held on June 18 – 22, 2014 in Moscow and Rybinsk, Russia.
CEE MVP Open Days is annual event for Microsoft MVP Award Program members who live in Central and Eastern Europe.
The program included three events
MVP Day in Microsoft Russia, Moscow/Russia June 18th– public event where MVPs from across CEE will present technical sessions for local technical community in Moscow, Russia. It is first “community for community” event in Microsoft Russia, so the MVPs will contribute to it-community ecosystem in Russia – around 300 attendees.
CEE MVP Open Days 2014, Rybinsk, Russia June 19-20th– the conference itself, the special event for MVPs, where all the content are confidential and under NDA – around 50 Microsoft MVPs
MVP Upper Volga Tour, Uglich/Kalyazin/Russia, June 21-22st - special networking activity for MVPs who wants to participate voluntary
Infragistics was presented by me as a speaker – CEE MVP Open Days in Rybinsk.
Summary:
The conference venue in Rybinsk
Just before the first session
Bernardin Katic is talking about how to organize community events
Only Microsoft MVPs
Infragistics participation in the event:
Follow news from Infragistics for more information about new Infragistics events.
As always, you can follow us on Twitter @mihailmateev and @Infragistics and stay in touch on Facebook, Google+ andLinkedIn!
The following are the answers to the questions that were submitted to the Q&A box during the webinar on 6/19/2014. Thanks again for attending.
Q: Is the new control (xamDiagram) available to WinForm application?
A: The control is currently built in XAML – however you could use this WPF control within your Windows Forms application through the use of Element Host.
Here is a Microsoft article walk-through that shows how you can do this. You can use any WPF control that you like: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742215(v=vs.110).aspx
Q: For WPF Excel component, is it possible to hide the header and left most column (ie. the A,B,C and 1,2,3) so a user wouldnt realize its a spreadsheet?
A: Yes, this is possible – the Worksheet object has this property: http://help.infragistics.com/doc/WPF/2014.1/CLR4.0/?page=InfragisticsWPF4.Documents.Excel.v14.1~Infragistics.Documents.Excel.DisplayOptions~ShowRowAndColumnHeaders.html
So, you would do something like this: MyWorkSheet.DisplayOptions.ShowRowAndColumnHeaders = false;
Just get a reference to the Worksheet in the Worksheet collection or whenever you create and add a worksheet, keep track of the reference to that worksheet.
Worksheet Class http://help.infragistics.com/doc/WPF/2014.1/CLR4.0/?page=InfragisticsWPF4.Documents.Excel.v14.1~Infragistics.Documents.Excel.Worksheet_members.html
WorksheetDisplayOptions class: http://help.infragistics.com/doc/WPF/2014.1/CLR4.0/?page=InfragisticsWPF4.Documents.Excel.v14.1~Infragistics.Documents.Excel.WorksheetDisplayOptions_members.html
Q: Will you have any more in depth webinars on the WPF IG Outlook sample...?
A: We currently do not have any scheduled at the moment, however, we will give your suggestion to the product / marketing team for future webinar possibilities. And, as you know, you can always get in touch with our Developer Support if you ever had any questions on how to go about building this, or if you run into any problems, questions, or not sure which direction to go when putting this together.
Submit Support Request:
https://www.infragistics.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fmy-account%2fsubmit-support-request%2f
We have hit the half way point of the year, so it seemed a good time to take a look at some interesting trends we have seen so far in 2014. Hopefully you will recognise the majority of these, and will have touched them in your work at some point. Add a comment below with your thoughts.
1. Flat Design
Our first trend affects designers, UX/UI professionals, and developers alike. All of these people will have struggled to escape the launch of iOS 7 late last year, and the focus it brought to ‘flat design’ (and the end of the principles of Skeuomorphic design). 2014 has seen flat design go nuclear, with websites large and small looking to redesign themselves to fall inline. Even Google got in on the act.
As demonstrated by: iOS 7 and nearly every website launch and mobile app of 2014.
2. The continuing popularity of CSS frameworks
Tools like LESS and SASS are continuing to find favour with web developers. Such frameworks offer well-defined programming constructs (such as code blocks and variables) in the traditionally fast and loose world of CSS. The old school development community might see this as a fuss about nothing, but those who have struggled to tame CSS over the last few years see such CSS extensions as really useful innovations.
As demonstrated by: Google’s unwavering support for pre-processors being matched by Microsoft (The recent Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 added much improved support for SASS editing).
3. Single page apps
Chiefly a response to the need for better HTML5 mobile apps (less round tripping/data requests and slicker user experiences), the single page app is just that - a website consisting of just a single page. Such apps - where the data and presentation layers are totally separated - are designed to look and behave like native phone or tablet apps, with background data refreshes and rich UI interactions. The term ‘single page app’ was actually coined in 2005, but 2014 has seen huge growth in interest and adoption..
As demonstrated by: Google’s much loved (by most) AngularJS framework.
4. The rise and rise of JavaScript frameworks
In 2014 the JavaScript framework is, in itself, nothing new. But this year we have seen some very impressive innovations. Take Famo.us for example, an open source framework designed to help developers build complex user interfaces. More than that though Famo.us is the first framework to offer its own rendering engine (separate to the browser it is running in), which it can do by taking advantage of client GPU acceleration. This allows for some impressive effects like 3D processing and physics simulations. Truly a step forward for JavaScript.
As demonstrated by: Famo.us has just opened its beta program to all developers.
5. Web based development environments
The web development community is used to pushing the power of the browser. In 2014 we saw it able to harness that power for its own means. A number of browser based Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have surfaced which give developers a realistic alternative to traditional desktop tools. Google has its own effort called Spark, and Pario attempts to give less technical users something they can use to create code.
As demonstrated by: Google Spark, Codio, and countless others.
Hey, do you know about the Infragistics Web Design Council? If not, read on!
What is the Infragistics Web Design Council?
It’s a select group of Infragistics customers who want to have early access to what we are working on to provide early feedback and help shape the Web products to better suit your needs.
Why join?
In this program, you will have access to exclusive information, early-preview software, and avenues of feedback. Under a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement, we can more freely share information that is not released publicly yet and thereby better integrate you into our design and development process, which means you know what is coming and, more importantly, you get to help shape the future of Infragistics Web tools to maximize your productivity and effectiveness.
How does it work?
The primary mode of involvement is through a private mailing list. Once you are a member, you will be able to send to and receive from that list. When we are ready to share new software builds, we’ll email the list to let you know about it and how to get it, as well as the timeframe for feedback.
If you are interested, you can grab it, try it out, and let us know how you think it could be tweaked to help you and your company more.
We may also just ping you with general questions, maybe even share some prototypes, design docs, etc. Our goal is to get you involved more and earlier so that what we make is as close as it can be to what you need.
How much time does it take?
That’s pretty much up to you. It’s not going to be a high volume list most of the time. Traffic will come in spurts around when we send out questions/things for review. It’s totally up to you if you respond and participate at any given time.
Okay! How do I apply?
Send an email to igniteui [at] infragistics [dot] com with your customer information and asking to join our private Web Design Council. We will then pass along our mutual NDA form that we’ll need you to sign for your company and either scan and email or fax back to us. After that, we will add you to the email list, and you’re in!
(If you think you already are under an NDA with us, let us know who your account rep is so that we can verify.)
That’s it. We hope you will join—we want our customers to feel empowered to shape the future of Infragistics Web tools.
Oh, and by the way, another great way to contribute to the future of our products is by suggesting and voting on product ideas—we use that to help us prioritize what we do for you! Drop by any time—we want to hear from you!
During the Google I/O conference yesterday, Google revealed their brand new Android L Developer Preview. This is actually the FIRST time Google is releasing a developer preview, so it’s a pretty big deal. Not only does Android L have a new enhanced look, but it also has deeper ties to the web making it more user friendly.
For More In-Depth Info about Android L from Industry Pros, Check Out:
In version 3, we added the capability to create custom UI libraries using screenparts. If you haven't tried this yet, you are missing out :D.This was one of the top requested ideas. And with that, it's time to move on to even bigger and better things. Keep the ideas rolling in!
To kick off the "update" season for Version 3, we added the following new features in update 1:
When we have shipped the Table of Contents in the prototype viewer, it showed the names of the screens. We figured viewing the screen thumbnails makes it a more recognizable experience. So now when you pull out the table of contents, you see screen names + thumbs. I know, not earth shattering, but it's a nicer experience.
Quite of few of you have been requesting more fonts for Indigo. It's not because we aspire to be stingy about this, but given the focus on rapid prototyping, we felt a smaller font list will be quicker to help you pick a reasonable one, and move on the bigger things :D. But we understand that sometimes fonts can set the mood, and may be important. With this update, we added support for Source Sans Pro, Roboto and Roboto Condensed.
There are a few reasons why we are adding fonts (and font weights in the future) carefully. A primary driver has been the need to embed fonts in the prototype so that we can support both offline and online uses. The last thing we want is you being unable to render the prototype correctly when offline. The other aspect we considered is that viewers of the prototype may not have the prototype font, and license restrictions may prevent us from embedding it. In either case, we are exploring ways to incorporate more open fonts and use it seamlessly whether online or offline. For now, your viewers will see exactly the same font you designed with.
Here's how to update the version of Indigo Studio installed on your machine:
Don't have Indigo Studio? Download a free 30-day trial which will let you try all of the prototyping goodness.
Looking to suggest improvements and new ideas for Indigo Studio?
If for some reason you are having trouble with Indigo Studio, check out our help topics, forums or contact support.
Follow us on Twitter @indigodesigned
In this update, we added several visual improvements to the look and feel of Indigo Studio in addition to adding some requested features. These include the following:
We finally got around to making some UI improvements to the project home. This involved making some of the toolbar actions more obvious.
The RUN button has a more consistent position in the app overall. We made the search feature more prominent and also unified the look of the design thumbnails and titles. Let us know how it's working our for you.
AFTER Update 2, your project home should look like this: 
This is how it looked BEFORE:
And by the way, the project home will remember the sort order when you relaunch the app (i.e., by name, recently changed).
Quite a few of have been using tools like snagit to capture screenshots. A lot such tools copy the image captured to the clipboard. So we have now made it easier for you to quickly paste it inside Indigo Studio without have to explicitly save this image first.
This works with other image editing tools as well (e.g., Preview on OSX, GIMP, MS Paint). When editing an image, you can select a region, copy it and paste it on the Indigo Studio design surface.
This feature does not need much explanation :D. It would suffice to say that with addition of recent colors (row), you don't have to look up the color values ;).
The eye-dropper, like in other tools, will let you sample and match colors from other images or colors on the design surface.
In update 1 (for v3), we introduced three new fonts. With update 2, once you pick a font, Indigo will remember it for the project. So if you started with Roboto, you can continue to create new text based elements without having to set it again.
On a related note, we minimized the font list when you initially load it up. This way you don't have to hunt for the new fonts we added. The open fonts we have selected to include for now are pretty resilient and should serve you well. You can, of course, expand to view all the supported fonts. Indigo warns you about unsupported system fonts (on OS X).
Here's how to update the version of Indigo Studio installed on your machine:
Don't have Indigo Studio? Download a free 30-day trial which will let you try all of the prototyping goodness.
Looking to suggest improvements and new ideas for Indigo Studio?
If for some reason you are having trouble with Indigo Studio, check out our help topics, forums or contact support.
Follow us on Twitter @indigodesigned
Infragistics Inc. was a sponsor of SQLSaturday #313 Rheinland, Germanu. Company provided licenses for the event raffle. 
Infragistics also was presented at SQLSaturday Rheinland by me by me as a speaker.
The event was held on Saturday, June 28th at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg Campus Sankt Augustin ( an university in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany).
There also was a big data hackathon, organized during the previous day – 27th of June.
Administrators of the conference were Olivel Engels , Tillmann Eitelberg and Kostja Klein .
They organized an amazing team of volunteers who did an awesome event.
This was the first Microsoft Data Platform event with Infragistics in Germany. Infragistics Inc. was the only one component vendor with a speaker at the conference. Participants gave a good feedback about the company presentation. There was also an interest in the Infragistics solutions, related to Development Tools, Data Visualization and Business Solutions. Infragistics presentation samples for Node.js and SQL Server included solutions implemented with the company products like Ignite UI. Hope in the near feature to have more closer contacts with professionals, community members and companies from this region.
Summary:
A Big Data Hackathon before SQLSaturday Rheinland
SQLSaturday Rheinland sessions…
During the breaks…
and more…
Infragistics participation in the event:
Follow news from Infragistics for more information about new Infragistics events.
As always, you can follow us on Twitter @mihailmateev and @Infragistics and stay in touch on Facebook, Google+ andLinkedIn!
In this video, we're going to take a look at the new XAM ribbon and XAM ribbon window features that have been added in Infragistics Ultimate 14.1 to help give your applications a Microsoft Office 2013 look and feel.
[youtube] width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/e_fhsVAEkM8" [/youtube]
TRANSCRIPT:
Here we have an existing WPF application that uses a ribbon and a XAM ribbon window. As you can see, we have a home tab with a few buttons, as well as, the Office 2010 blue theme applied.
If we run the application, we'll notice that we have our XAM ribbon window, and we also have a Backstage, which mimics the Office 2010 backstage.
In order to give this application a new Office 2013 look and feel, the easiest way to do that is to simply set the theme property of the XAM ribbon to Office 2013. Immediately, you're going to see the designer reflect a clean, modern Office 2013 look and feel.
Now when we run the application, you’ll notice that the application now has the Office 2013 look and feel. It also has the new Office 2013 backstage. (You can see with the back arrows how you would now escape the backstage. ) But pay specific attention to the window chrome. The chrome also has the new Office 2013 window look- that clean, modern, thin border around the window chrome.
But that's not all we can do with this. Let's say that we want to change the accent color of our ribbon and window chrome. We can change the accent color application by setting the “application accent color” property to a value of our choice. For example, let's look at what red looks like. By setting that single property, we've now changed the color of the border of our chrome of the window, as well as the backstage and file/menu options.
Another feature that's been added in 14.1 is what's called a “tap item tool bar”. Due to time constraints, I'm going to go paste in some pre-existing code. As you can see, I've created a new tab item area tool bar object: a “stack panel”, which contains a toggle button that has a control template. Basically what we're doing is mimicking that login functionality that you’ll find in current Microsoft Office products.
So now when I run this application, we’ll see that we now have this tab item area tool bar available to our end users. Notice that when I show the backstage, it stays in view just like the current Office products behave.
You could put any control you want in this area. You're not limited to specific object types here. You’ll also notice that this tab item area tool bar has an overflow. So when you minimize or resize your window, you have an overflow icon that allows you to access those items that you have placed in your tab item area tool bar.
Now, all these features are great for the main window of your application, but what about all the other dialogs and windows that show throughout your application? Luckily, you can easily apply the same window chrome to all the other windows by simply removing the ribbon.
Let's remove all that work we just did - we'll remove the ribbon and now we're going to set the theme property on the ribbon content host of the XAM ribbon. We'll set it to Office 2013 and run the application.
Even though we're not using the ribbon, we can still use the XAM ribbon window without a ribbon in order to give the rest of the windows, dialogs and pop-ups within our application a similar Office 2013 look and feel. This keeps your application consistent, and looks great.
You can also modify the application accent color by setting the application accent color property. But in this case, we have to use an attached property. We're going to say “ribbon window content host dot application accent color” and we'll just choose red again. We'll run the application again, and as you can see, we now have our XAM ribbon with no ribbon, but we're still able to leverage our accent color to keep our application consistent with the main window of our application!
In our latest how-to video, we show you how to create an Office-inspired Windows Forms application, complete with a Quick Access Toolbar! Check it out:
[youtube] width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CYQ7dR_gijE" [/youtube]
TRANSCRIPT:
First, we’ll open up Visual Studio, and go to "File," "New," "New Project," and start with the Windows Forms application. First let's make it larger. To start, we’re going to go to the Toolbox to add the UltraToolbarsManager. When we add that to the form, we're going to get prompted: do we want to add a Panel control? Let’s say yes and add a Panel control to the form, which is going to hold our control. We'll pick the middle option which is the lighter-weight Panel control.
So now what we’ll do is click "Show Ribbon" and right here at the top is a Quick Access Toolbar. To add a new tool here, simply click "Insert New Tool" and it's going to be type “button”, and let’s select “Cut”. At this point, let’s go ahead and add a little Cut button, like Cut and Paste. We’ll hit "Add" and "Close," and now you'll see that the button was added here but it has no image. So let's go ahead and add an image! We’ll right click on that, and under Images, I'm going to say "Set Small Image". I’ll navigate to an image - for a small button, you're going to want to use the image of size 24 x 24. So I’ll select the image called Cut. Click "OK," and click "OK" again, and there you have it. Now, you can see we have a Quick Access Tool right here: Cut. We’ll hit F5 to see what it looks like – and great! It looks good to me!
Now, the only thing we need to do is to handle the click event, and there’s a really easy way to do that. Click on the UltraToolbarsManager, open up the properties, and at the bottom right you'll notice “Generate Tool Click Code”. Let’s click that. Right now, I only have one command but just imagine if you had around 10 or 20 commands here. You're going to hit "Select All" and on the right, you'll see that the code is generated to handle that click event. So we’ll say Select All, Copy To Clipboard, close this, and now we need to get inside that click event of the toolbar. So let's double click to get to the UltraToolbarsManager_ToolClick event. Here we'll paste in our code that was generated for us.
Basically, here's what's happening: in this event, you get a ToolClickEventArg and you're basically just interrogating that object and looking at the key property and doing a case statement, so you might have a case for a copy, case for paste, etc. In this example, we're just going to have a cut, so let's just throw up a quick message - that looks good to me! Now let's hit F5, and there we go! I've gotten a Quick Access Tool here. I'll click it, and there we go. You can see that we've successfully invoked our code and that's all there is to it. To add more, you simply click on that new icon right next to it and just continue adding.
In this video, we walk through the steps you'll need to take to create a Windows Forms application with a Microsoft-Office-inspired ribbon. Check it out below:
[youtube] width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nu15-C43Fgg" [/youtube]
TRANSCRIPT:
Before we get started, I’m just going to pull up Microsoft Word to point out some of the pieces of the ribbon and talk about the object hierarchy.
At the top here you have the quick access toolbar, which is used to hold tools and commands that are available to your end user regardless of whatever tab they’re on, and regardless of whatever context they’re in. Below that you have the ribbon itself, which is composed of tabs. Each tab has one or more groups, such as clipboard, font, paragraph, et cetera, and each group has one or more tools, such as paste, cut and copy.
Now, let’s go ahead and open up Visual Studio and start building this app. We’re going to start by creating a new Windows Forms project. I’m just going to go ahead and use the defaults, so I’ll hit okay. The first thing that we’re going to do is make the form a little bit bigger to hold our toolbar. To achieve that ribbon, the first thing that you should do is go to the toolbox and search for the UltraToolbarsManager and double click it.
Now that that’s added to the project, the first thing that happens is that you’re going to be prompted to add a panel. We’ll choose the middle option, which adds a lightweight panel control.
To start building the ribbon, let’s click show ribbon, and to create a new tab, click this button right here. Right away, you have your first tab. Again, in this video, we’re trying to build something very similar to Word, so let’s go ahead and just start building it out.
Here you have our first tab. I’m going to hit F4 to bring the properties up, then I’ll choose select object, and we’ll see that the caption is “ribbon one” – let’s change that to “home”. Under home, you’ll see one group called ribbon group one. Again, we’re just going to click this, hit F4, and change the caption. We’ll call this clipboard.
Next we’re going to add the tools “paste, cut and copy” to this clipboard group of the tab called home. We’re going to click insert new tool, and create three buttons. The first one will be called paste. The next one will be called cut. Finally we’ll do copy. Now that we have our tools established, which are going to be “button”, let’s go ahead and configure that.
For the paste button, we want that to be large, and we want cut and copy to be small. To do that, we right click on paste, choose preferred size, select large, and then we’re going to set its image by right clicking on it and clicking set large image. We can import an image for a large tool button, so we’re going to want to use an image that’s 32 by 32. Once we find that, we’ll use that as “paste” and it’s large, just like we wanted.
Now, let’s quickly do the same thing for cut and copy, but in this case we’re going to leave them at default size, a small image. We’ll do the same thing and import, look for “cut”, and again we’re going to use 24 by 24 because it’s going to be the smaller version. Now we have cut. Let’s just quickly do the same for copy. Set small image, import, and let’s find copy. And there we go! Now we have paste, cut and copy.
Let’s just hit F5 and run this to see what it looks like so far. Here we have our ribbon and we have paste, cut and copy. It looks perfect. Now all we have to do is figure out how to get to the click event to actually wire up our logic. There’s a very easy way to do this. I’m going to click on UltraToolbarsManager, hit F4 to bring up properties, and right over here, at the bottom, you’ll see generate tool click code. I’m going to click that. Here you can see I’ve got a list of all of my commands. I’m going to click select all, and you’ll see that there’s going to be some code generated for me.
I’ll select all, copy to clipboard, hit close, and now just simply do a quick double click on the ribbon, and you’ll see the click event, with the UltraToolbarsManager. We’ll go ahead and paste in the code, and do a quick test here. That looks good to me!
Basically, what’s passed in is this ToolClickEventArgs, and you’re just interrogating the key. Based on the key, you’re going to write some code to handle it. In this case we’re just handling paste. Let’s hit F5, and there we go. That’s all there is to it!
Have you heard? An epic battle is going down here at Infragistics! Below, our own Ambrose Little and Steve Zaharuk go head to head over which is better: native or hybrid? And we want to hear your side of things too! Read on to see how they stack up against each other and then weigh in with your vote in the comments below. Ready? FIGHT!
Depending on your level of competency with a particular platform, you could probably get approval and get to market faster with native because each platform has their UI patterns, styles, and conventions baked in. BUT - if you're targeting more than one mobile platform (who isn't?), a hybrid approach allows you to essentially develop one app to run on all platforms. It's never that easy, of course, but there's a good chance you'd see a big time, effort, and cost savings with hybrid or web.
I don't think there is a clear cut answer to the question of Native vs Hybrid or Web. It's all about how much time and money you're able or willing to spend. Having said that, I think that hybrid web apps might be best here! If you need something for an internal application, building a web app is really a great choice. You can generally build something quickly and easily deploy internally, no matter what devices your employees are using.
The same factors are at play here as they are in the development time. Each new feature has to be developed X times individually if you are native, as opposed to, essentially, one time if you are Web/hybrid. But where you see fewer savings is in testing and potential bugs. No matter what you will want to test on your key target platforms, and hybrid/Web can introduce some issues that you won't see with native, most notably with performance and app store approval challenges.
If you're creating applications that work on multiple mobile platforms, you have to re-write at least the UI portion of the application on each platform, which takes time, which costs money. In creating a native experience, you get a lot for free. The API's that each of the platforms provide really guide you into the best practices. On top of that the tooling for all of these platforms keeps getting better and better, including IDEs, Interface designers, Automated Testing and even Performance Testing.
As a rule, native apps almost always win in the UX category, thanks to their performance-you just can't get the level of smoothness in Web/hybrid that you can get in native. I would go as far as to say that this is more or less THE determining consideration as to whether or not to go native. If you really need that extra polish, you should build native. But for many apps that's not necessarily crucial, and the benefit of having the same design and interactions for your app across platforms can be a winning factor.
This is where Native shines. You shouldn't be creating a single application that has the exact same user experience on all platforms. Users have come to expect a certain level of experience when they use an application on their platform, and if you fail to deliver that, they may just stop using your application. With native, you can really create a high-quality application that feels like it truly belongs on the platform. You simply just can't capture that native experience with a hybrid or web solution.
Steve and Ambrose both agree: Infragistics Ultimate offers native and hybrid/web tools, so you can experiment to find the right balance of quality and cost. With Ultimate, you get high quality, advanced line-of-business and data visualization components for iOS and Android, which work in Objective-C, Swift and Java. And these controls all have wrappers that allow them to work 100% in C# with Xamarin. You also get great applications samples that show you how to take both approaches, and the best interaction prototyping tool on the market-Indigo Studio-that you can use to discover the best designs regardless of which implementation platform you choose. The best part is you can purchase without regret. If you decide to go web and can't get the design/usability you want, you can easily switch to native and have the same great tooling experience. To experience the best of both worlds, download your free trial of Infragistics Ultimate today!
We want to hear it! Join the debate in the comments below – let’s get it started!
Infragistics Friends group, BI & .NET Geeks (Bulgarian PASS Chapter) with the help of Infragistics Inc. organized a presentation on “T-SQL Performance Tips” . Infragistics Friends group is an official PASS Chapter in Bulgaria under the name BI &. NET Geeks and we try to provide more BI and data platform related content.
The event was held on Wednesday, July 9th, 2014 at Infragistics Bulgaria Office, 110B, Simeonovsko Shosse Bul., Sofia, Bulgaria.
This presentation was a practical session about T-SQL queries optimization. .
SQL Server optimizer doesn't use and index seek for execution of your query although the quer is high selective? What is better, when and why: LIKE vs: SUBSTRING, IN vs. EXISTS, SUBQUERY vs. JOIN. Why you should not use the UPPER or LOWER functions? How to avoid non-SARG-able WHERE clauses? Which query takes about 3 minutes in SQL Server 2008 and only one second in SQL Server 2012? In this session we will answer these questions and show how bad designed queries lead to poor execution plans. We will offer recommendations and tips how to avoid performance problems caused by poor query design (functions in WHERE clause, data type conversions…) and explain how local variables and parameters affect the generation of execution plan.
Speaker was Milos Radivojevic
Milos Radivojevic is a database developer and consultant, speaker, and trainer and is located in Vienna, Austria. He has been working with SQL Server over 10 years. He is MCT and MCITP for SQL Server 2008 and specializes in SQL Server for application developers and performance and query tuning.In March 2013 he joined bwin.party's database development team.
This session was very useful for:
· Developers / QE / who test products using optimized queries and to receive the best results. They also can provide better samples, which demonstrate better performance just because of the query optimization.
· Consultants who want to help customers to improve the performance of their solutions without any additional work, related to the specific product .
· Web developers who want to use SQL Server with web applications more effectively.
- All kind of SQL Server specialists
Summary:
Milos Redivojevic in action!
As always, you can follow us on Twitter @mihailmateev and @Infragistics and stay in touch onFacebook,Google+andLinkedIn!
Heeeeere's your news roundup for the past week!
5. Top 10 Programmers in World History (Fuzzy Programs)
4. What Makes a Good Programmer? (Henrik Warne)
3. 9 Things I Learned as a Software Engineer (Medium.com)
2. Writing C# Code Using SOLID Principles (Thoughts on .NET and Coding)
1. Basic Comparison of C# and Apple Swift Programming Language Syntax (Chris Pietschmann)
There you have it!!!
With every release comes a set of release notes that reflects the state of resolved bugs and new additions from the previous release. You’ll find these notes useful to help determine the resolution of existing issues from a past release and as a means of determining where to test your applications when upgrading from one version to the next.
Release notes are available in both PDF and Excel formats. The PDF summarizes the changes to this release along with a listing of each item. The Excel sheet includes each change item and makes it easy for you to sort, filter and otherwise manipulate the data to your liking.
In order to download release notes, use the following links:
• PDF - Infragistics WinForms 2014 Volume 1
• Excel - Infragistics WinForms 2014 Volume 1
• PDF - Infragistics WinForms 2013 Volume 2
• Excel - Infragistics WinForms 2013 Volume 2
The event was held on Saturday, July 12th at Cherno More Hotel, Varna , Bulgaria. Varna Conf is a community event, a part of the it-tour.bg project of the Bulgarian independent IT communities from different locations. This conference includes sessions, related to different technologies: .NET, OSS, Java, iOS, JS, Cloud Computing etc.
The main organizers and administrators of Varna Conf were Dimitar Georgiev and Radoslav Stankov.
Infragistics was presented by me as a speaker - Node.js and Open Source Software Development on Microsoft Azure
Summary:
Varna Conf sessions:
The lightning talks:
Infragistics participation in the event:
Follow news from Infragistics for more information about new Infragistics events.
As always, you can follow us on Twitter @mihailmateev and @Infragistics and stay in touch on Facebook, Google+ andLinkedIn!
